For information visualization researchers, eye tracking has been a useful tool to investigate research participants' underlying cognitive processes by tracking their eye movements while they interact with visual techniques. We used an eye tracker to better understand why participants with a variant of a tabular visualization called 'SimulSort' outperformed ones with a conventional table and typical one-column sorting feature (i.e., Typical Sorting). The collected eye-tracking data certainly shed light on the detailed cognitive processes of the participants; SimulSort helped with decision-making tasks by promoting ef cient browsing behavior and compensatory decision-making strategies. However, more interestingly, we also found unexpected eye-tracking patterns with SimulSort. We investigated the cause of the unexpected patterns through a crowdsourcing-based study (i.e., Experiment 2), which elicited an important limitation of the eye tracking method: incapability of capturing peripheral vision. This particular result would be a caveat for other visualization researchers who plan to use an eye tracker in their studies. In addition, the method to use a testing stimulus (i.e., in uential column) in Experiment 2 to verify the existence of such limitations would be useful for researchers who would like to verify their eye tracking results.

Over the past forty years, Howard Barrows' contributions to PBL research have influenced and guided educational research and practice in a diversity of domains. It is necessary to make visible to all PBL scholars what has been accomplished, what is perceived as significant, and what is the scope of applicability for Barrows' groundbreaking findings. As more disciplines recognize Barrows' efforts and adopt PBL in education, it becomes crucial but challenging to sustain community memory so that PBL scholars are kept well informed of research innovations in various domains. In this paper, we review Barrows' scholarly efforts in PBL and reveal the impacts on subsequent studies in various domains. A bibliometrics analysis is conducted on Barrows' PBL publications and the corresponding citations to quantitatively measure Barrows' impact. Our findings demonstrate Barrows' exceptional contributions to PBL and the disciplinary differences in conducting PBL studies based on Barrows' work. It is also revealed that PBL scholars who share similar interests have rarely collaborated with each other. The PBL research community has a real opportunity to connect isolated research groups and reduce the fragmentation so that research innovations in one domain can be disseminated to inform other scholars.

Background Engineering education has become a large community with an increasing

We present a design study of the Deep Insights Anywhere, Anytime (DIA2) platform, a web-based visual analytics system that allows program managers and academic staff at the U.S. National Science Foundation to search, view, and analyze their research funding portfolio. The goal of this system is to facilitate users' understanding of both past and currently active research awards in order to make more informed decisions of their future funding. This user group is characterized by high domain expertise yet not necessarily high literacy in visualization and visual analytics-they are essentially casual experts-and thus require careful visual and information design, including adhering to user experience standards, providing a self-instructive interface, and progressively refining visualizations to minimize complexity. We discuss the challenges of designing a system for casual experts and highlight how we addressed this issue by modeling the organizational structure and workflows of the NSF within our system. We discuss each stage of the design process, starting with formative interviews, prototypes, and finally live deployments and evaluation with stakeholders.

Dr. Madhavan also served as a Research Scientist at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, Information Technology at Purdue University where he led the education and the educational technology effort for the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). His work focuses on how semantic grid-based technologies and tools can co-exist with students' lifestyles, learning patterns, and technology choices. Dr. Madhavan was the Chair of the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing Education Program 2006 and was the curriculum director for the Supercomputing Education Program 2005. In 2008, he was awarded the NSF CAREER award for work on learner-centric, adaptive cyber-tools and cyber-environments. He was one of 49 faculty members selected as the nation's top engineering educators and researchers by the US National Academy of Engineering to the Frontiers in Engineering Education symposium.